U.S. Pat. No. 6,560,029 to Dobbie et al., assigned to the common assignee of this invention, and incorporated herein by references, discloses a video enhanced night vision system comprising a head mount assembly, an image intensified video camera, and a display. Other pending applications, namely Ser. No. 10/024,436, published as U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US 2003/0115661, and Ser. No. 10/024,650, published as U.S. Patent Application Publication No. U.S. 2003/0115662, both of which also name Dobbie et al. as inventors, are assigned to the common assignee of this invention, and are incorporated herein by reference. These applications disclose a head mount apparatus and adjustment mechanisms for a head mount apparatus, respectively, for use with video enhanced night vision systems.
Other night vision devices and head-mounting systems are also known in the art. Conventional mounting mechanisms for affixing vision enhancing devices to headgear, such as helmets or head mounts, may be as simple as a clamp affixing a device to a welding helmet harness or as complex as assemblies having several degrees of freedom of adjustment to position the device in front of the eye or eyes.
Positioning adjustments are desirable because of anthropometric variability between users. For example, a device affixed in a permanent location on a particular headgear would only lie in the line of sight of a very small portion of the people in a given population. In order to accommodate anthropometric variation, some conventional mechanisms provide a forward tilt, a lateral slide, and a vertical adjustment. Additional features on some mounting mechanisms provide for the removal of the device and/or a flip-away or slide mechanism to allow storage of the device away from the line of sight when not in use. Conventional adjustment mechanisms often require the user to adjust each degree of freedom successively.
Ideally, as shown in FIG. 15, the optical axis of the vision enhancement device or camera OAC is parallel to the optical axis of the display OAD and the both of these optical axes are preferably parallel to the user's line of sight, which is essentially normal to the viewing plane VP. In particular, it is desirable for the user's line of sight through the user's display-viewing eye (LS) to align with the optical axis of the display OAD. Most vision enhancement device mounting mechanisms, however, do not provide enough degrees of freedom to facilitate optical axes alignment (alignment of the vision enhancement device optical axis OAC to user line of sight LS) and have no provisions for adjusting parallelism between the display and sensor optical axes OAD and OAC or aligning the display optical axis with the user's line of sight through his or her display-viewing eye.
Furthermore, where multiple degrees of freedom of adjustment are available, the adjustment mechanisms may include a number of separate knobs or levers in locations on the mounting attachment that may be difficult to for the user to find and manipulate during use. Often, adjustments must be made iteratively, because the adjustment of one requires the repositioning of another. For example, tilting of optical systems may move the system optical axis out of the user's line of sight.
Thus, it is desirable to provide enhancements that improve upon previously designed systems by incorporating multiple degrees of freedom in a consolidated adjustment location, providing additional degrees of freedom for alignment of the sensor and display optical axes, and integrating at least some of the adjustment mechanisms to enable adjustment of at least some mechanisms without interference with other adjustment mechanisms. It is also desirable for the mounting system to enable one or more of the following: quick removal of system from mount, left/right side compatibility, quick manipulation of the device into a storage configuration, and one hand operation.